


Good At Falling

by bastardoftherealm



Category: Smosh
Genre: Kinda, M/M, based on some songs but japanese house, basically sappy boys, high school au basically, oh and lots of himbo shayne and morosexual damien, probably set in the early 2000's?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-01-30 07:54:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21424789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastardoftherealm/pseuds/bastardoftherealm
Summary: I keep looking for something, even though I know that it's not there.From the movements you made, and the soft gaze you gave. You understood.How can you wait in the wash of the rain? You're soaked to your feet. Still, you said you'd wait for me.You were beckoning me. Tried to keep my eyes closed, I want you so bad.You were floating like a lilo, with your eyes closed, going where the tide goes.Or, a romance in five parts.
Relationships: Damien Haas/Shayne Topp
Comments: 13
Kudos: 104





	1. maybe you're the reason

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I keep looking for something, even though I know that it's not there._

_ If the dumb jocks in the back of class throws that one more time _\- 

Damien tightens his grip on his pencil as another piece of paper hits him in the back of the head. He hears it fall to the floor, bouncing towards his feet. 

The snickering from the back is the worst of it all. If they weren’t so fucking _ stupid _ it would be better. He can hear them making fun of him, their hushed voices mocking him in every damn way. 

The better part of him, the rational part, is telling him to ignore it. They’re dumb stupid boys! What do they know about him anyway. He feels himself reach down, picking up the paper slowly. Damien unfurls it, but it’s as blank as he suspects the jock’s minds are. 

They’ve stopped making their monkey noises now, and have moved on to grooming each other’s egos like howler monkeys. Damien pulls his pencil from the table, scratching a note on it. He balls the note up, tucking it into his fist. As class ends, he throws the ball back at the first dumb jock he sees. 

He happens to choose the muscled freak with eyes that look like they’ve been hooked up to a generator that’s been turned up to ten. Damien’s not surprised when he’s slammed against a locker, meaty fingers grabbing his sweatshirt. Except, he realizes quickly that the fingers aren’t meaty, and that the jock looks just as surprised as he does slamming someone against some lockers. 

The monkey noises come again, and the boy seems to find himself. Damien sees a fist rear back, hesitate, and then accelerate full force into his face.

The ground tastes better than he expects it to, _ breaking a lot of expectations today _, Damien thinks stupidly. 

He peels himself off of the floor, rubbing his sore eye as he watches the dumb jock leave out of his good one.

The dumb jock high-fives his friend, and Damien can’t tell for sure, but he swears that the stupid boy with electric eyes looks back at him. 


	2. clean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _From the movements you made, and the soft gaze you gave. You understood._

After he fails his biology final, (and, ultimately, probably biology in general) Damien escapes the supplementing lecture at home on the pedals of a bike. He doesn’t stop until he finds himself at the base of the woods outside of town. Before Boze had moved away and left him as a loner for good, she had told him that there was an old quarry lake somewhere in the woods. 

She said that she used to go there to hook up in some old cave above the lake, but he’s less interested in the cave, and more so interested in the lake. 

The summer heat had rolled in weeks before school finally ended, and the lake seemed like the perfect place to let the year's torture from the dumb jocks slide off his shoulders before the true horror, a hoard of cranky customers at the gas station convenience store that was a lame excuse for a summer job, began. He didn’t bring his swim trunks or anything, but if it was as secluded at Boze said it might be, the only prying eyes seeing him swimming in his underwear or less would be any sorts of fish that lived in the water. If fish could live in quarry lakes. As said before, he’s (probably) failed biology. 

Damien walks his bike through the woods, finding the clearing up ahead that swoops into a steep drop that fed into the mouth of the quarry lake, just where she’d said it’d be. Below him, he spots somebody swimming in the mouth of the quarry, perfect strokes breaking even against an invisible tide. Damien begins circling the hill, tiptoeing down the slope until he ends up abandoning his bike halfway down. He jumps down onto the rocks that act as a stand in for a normal sand beach, before scanning the lake for the swimmer he saw from above. Damien find nothing but the flat stillness of untouched water. 

He doesn’t call out for anyone, his footsteps that crunch through the rocks are loud enough. Just as Damien is beginning to decide he’s lost it, a figure steps from the small mess of shrubbery trees that gathered in the shade of the base of the quarry walls. 

Swim trunks stick to his skin like a deflated balloon, hanging low on his hips. His body is toned, with the pale tan of the beginning of summer. Then he catches the boy’s eyes, and his fingertips draw to his cheek, the skin that had for weeks been black and blue and was at the tail end of healing, stinging with phantom pain. 

“What are you doing down here?” 

Damien realizes then that he’s never heard the stupid jock boy speak before, besides the occasional monkey noise. His voice is high-toned, somewhat nasally but Damien guesses that it’s more that he’s surprised than anything else. 

Damien shrugs, kicking a rock into the lake. “Failed a test?” He doesn’t  _ want _ to make conversation with the strange stupid-monkey-fish-jock-boy, but his curiosity and his odd fascination with the water that sticks to the muscled skin gets the better of him. “Why are you here?” 

“I like swimming.” 

_ That’s dumb, _ Damien thinks, “oh yeah,” Damien says. He kicks another rock, shifting his hips forward slightly. “How did you know about this place?”

“A friend told me. You?”

“Same.” He continues his awkward swaying, keeping his eyes on the ground in front of the boy. “So are you gonna beat me up for invading your lake, or whatever you guys do to assert your stupid dominance.”

“Why would I-“ He narrows his eyes, stepping forward slightly. “You’re that guy, the one from third period.”

“Does the one you punched ring a bell?”

“I punch a lot of people,” he muttered. “But I do...remember you.”

“Are you-”

“I’m not going to punch you,” the jock says flatly. “But it seems like you want me to.” He curls his fingers into a fist. “And my punching hand is a little out of practice.” 

Damien stumbles back, nearly falling back into the rocks. “I don’t, I don’t-” 

The boy laughs, letting his hand fall to his side, “I’m kidding, nerd.” 

“Okay...jock.” 

“Is that what I am? Some dumb jock?” The boy poses.

“You just called me a nerd!”

“It wasn’t-” the boy rolls his eyes. “You know what I meant!” He presses his lips together. “Are you going to swim?” 

Damien shrugs, “maybe.”

The jock mocks him slightly, “maybe? Well  _ maybe _ if you’re done yelling at me from afar, then I'd like to get back to the lake,” he says, gesturing with his head. The dumb jock moves to speak again, but closes his mouth, and instead heads towards the water, getting knee deep before diving in and disappearing beneath the water. 

Damien follows him closely, watching a head appear first, followed by the rest of a streamlined body, and then arms reaching up into freestyle, and legs kicking against the wake of his own body. He finds himself on the warmth of a smooth bolder, sunning himself like some sort of cold-blooded creature. The backpack weighs heavy on his shoulders, and he shrugs it onto the rocks below.

He leans back on his hands, watching as the dumb jock boy breaches the water, treading it out in the middle of it all. He smooths back his hair with one hand, and looks out at Damien, and for a second, the dumb jock boy is looking at him with such an odd expression. 

The heat is getting to him. He pulls his shirt over his head, but leaves his shorts on, and watches as the boy disappears beneath the surface. 

Damien wades into the water, the lake cool against his skin. He scans the lake’s surface for the strange jock boy, but it’s hard to see through all the green.

Then the water ahead of him is lifts away as the boy stands, dripping with lake water and a piece of algae that clings to his shoulder. He holds out his hand, his face undeterminable, with patches of hair swinging into his face.

“Trust me?” 

“Definitely not.”

But Damien lets him take his hand anyway, and finds himself being tugged forward into the water. It isn’t because he was afraid of what the dumb-fish-jock-boy might do, but because of that look on his face. He understands something that Damien doesn’t, a mischievous grin that seems to indicate some manner of intelligence that he assumed the boy lacked.

As Damien’s nose fills with water, and as his head lifts from the lake, hacking it up as the less-dumb-jock boy laughs at him in the background, something in him feels like it cracks, just slightly.


	3. cool blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _How can you wait in the wash of the rain? You're soaked to your feet. Still, you said you'd wait for me._

Damien leans over the counter at the gas station convenience store that was both his summer job, and his veritable prison. The slow roll of customers paired with the heat makes for a boring shift. He’s restocked everything, recovered twice, and even had time to clean our the hot dog spits, which, after doing so, he’s pretty sure have never been cleaned in their entire existence. 

A fan spins lazily overhead, barely providing any reprieve from the heat wave that has been spanning the entire summer. His manager had disappeared into the break room, and Damien could probably get away with watching television full volume if he wanted to. He picks up one of the gas station’s brand jerky sticks, peeling it open and taking a bite. It’s disgusting, mostly salt, but he eats it anyway. 

As he tosses the wrapper in the trash, the taste of jerky lingers on his tongue, souring as time passes. He watches the parking lot, clouds rolling in overhead, people in cars pulling in for gas before jetting off to wherever people went on summer days like this. 

He sets his head on the counter, which is surprisingly cool. Damien runs his hands through his hair, scratching his scalp as he cusses out his shift under his breath. 

“Uhh are you open?” 

Damien whips up from the counter, nearly falling over from the sudden whiplash. “YES.” His eyes focus, and they’re met with electric blue intensity. A familiar electric blue. 

“Nerd,” the stupid jock boy remarks.

“Jock,” he replies breathlessly. 

The boy sets down an ice tea that comes in one of those bright blue cans, a bag of chips and two candy bars. “You work here?” 

“Unfortunately.” Damien taps some things into the register. “Gotta save for college one way or another.” He scans the jock boy’s items and puts them in a plastic bag with a giant smiley face on the side.

“When do you get off?” 

Damien raises an eyebrow as the boy hands him a twenty. “Off of what?”

“Your shift?” He says it like it’s supposed to be obvious. 

“Uhh,” Damien counts out jock boy’s change. “Like an hour?” He hands him the bills, dropping the coins into his waiting hand. “Why?” 

“I was about to head down to the lake, and you’re here…” The jock shakes his blonde head. “I dunno, just a random thought you don’t have to-”

"You really want to associate with a nerd like me?" Damien raises an eyebrow. 

"I just...uh...forget it, it's just that you were cool, like you're a cool nerd, who's not too weird, you get what I mean right? Like-"

Damien rolls his eyes and picks up the phone, pressing down the page button. “Hey Tammy I’m going home early, I don’t feel good.” 

A voice croaks from the back. “Fine!” 

The jock raises his eyebrows, his face turning up into a grin. “Did you really-”

“Guess I’m not a nerd,” Damien pulls the vest off, and tosses it under the counter. “I’m a delinquent.” He winks before he overthinks it. 

The boy seems lost for words for a second before stumbling over them finally. “Oh-Okay!” 

Damien and the jock take their bikes down to the woods, walking them to the edge. The boy shows Damien a better place to put their bikes for the time being, before the two of them pull off shirts and shorts and barrel into the water.

They race to the other end, and the jock teaches Damien how to best dive off of the rocky edge into the depth below. Damien swears that he could spend his whole summer here...and he wouldn’t mind if the dumb jock boy were there too. 

He finds himself floating in the middle of the lake when the first raindrop hits. It smacks him square in the forehead, and he has to blink the water out of his eyes. 

Damien rights himself, turning to find the jock boy swimming like a fish. He waves a hand, catching the boy’s attention. His hair flattens against his head as he turns to wave back at Damien. The rain is falling more steadily now, and he seems to get the message. 

The two swim towards shore, the jock-fish-boy much faster than Damien. When he steps out of the water, the rain is so heavy he can barely see the boy ahead of him, but there he stands, drenched in the downpour. 

“It’s too heavy to get back safely!” Damien yells over the roar of the water. “Isn’t there a cave near here?” 

The jock boy points upwards, and Damien sees the dark mouth of a cavern a few hundred feet from them at the base of the quarry walls. They grab their drenched clothing and hightail it towards the cave. 

The boy crawls up into the cave, reaching down to help Damien up after him. They roll in together, crawling away from the mouth of the cave, still spitting in some of the water from outside. 

They stumble to their feet, and Damien can feel a hand on his arm. He grabs back for it, a hand wrapping around the cool skin of a muscled arm. Then there’s laughter, bouncing off the cave walls and in and out of Damien’s eardrums. He feels the boy grip him tighter, and Damien brushes his hair out of his eyes to see him grinning. 

“That was in-SANE.” Damien feels him let go of his arm, and he turns towards the downpour outside cave mouth. “THIS is insane!” He turns back towards Damien, “wow.” 

“Are you okay...dude?” 

“Shayne.” The once stupid jock smiles at him. “It’s Shayne.” 

“Damien,” he replies. 

“So Damien,” he turns back towards the water. “How long do you think we’re going to be in here for?” 

Damien narrows his eyes at the storm, rubbing his bare shoulders as a flash of lightning illuminates the cave walls. “It could be another few minutes, it could be another few hours.” 

Shayne sits against where the cave floor arcs up into the wall. “My mom’s going to kill me.”

“Well,” Damien crosses his arms against his chest for warmth. “If you want to chance running, I don’t live very far from here.” 

“If you have a phone, and a change of clothes, I’m in.” 


	4. saw you in a dream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _You were beckoning me. Tried to keep my eyes closed, I want you so bad._

Damien lays on his back in bed, listening to the soft breathing of the boy that lay on the floor beneath him.

They’d made it, barely, but they’d made it. The storm still hasn’t let up, and rages on as Shayne sleeps, and Damien pretends to. 

After Shayne showered, appearing with his hair still dripping on the grey hoodie Damien lent him, he discovered Damien’s Wii, and the two battled it out in Super Smash Bros for a while, (Damien had won gloriously most of the time) before ordering pizza. 

Now it’s 2am, and Shayne has fallen asleep on his floor. 

Damien crosses his arms over his chest, before finally rolling over onto his side, watching the bare light coming in through his window as it falls on the upper half of Shayne’s face. His chest raises as he breaths, and Damien watches his nostrils flare just slightly. Eyelashes that curl up perfectly, and lips pressed together slightly.

He feels his eyes flutter just slightly, the heaviness of sleep weighing down on his chest. Damien drifts off, unsure of the feelings he has staring down at a face like that. He always liked staring at the dumb jocks, he’d never understood why. It couldn’t be that he…no. Right?

~

_ “The storm is really getting bad.” Shayne stands in front of the cave entrance, still in his swimwear.  _

_ “Best to wait it out here.” Damien whispers. “Too wet and cold to go all the way back to town in weather like this.”  _

_ “It’s still cold,” Shayne rubs his bare arms. “And our clothes are soaked, it’s not like we can make a fire either.”  _

_ “Then should we…?”  _

_ “Uh…” _

_ Damien waves his hands. “We don’t have to, it was just a suggestion, I mean, if we want to stay warm.”  _

_ The boy laughs, and Damien likes the way his eyes crinkle up at the edges. “I wasn’t saying no.” He feels the warmth of a body next to his own, and he leans against it, the bare skin of their shoulders pressing against one another. They don’t talk, and Damien feels his eyes trail across skin, and then there’s a feeling he hasn’t had in a long time.  _

_ There’s an ache in his stomach that growls softly, not out of hunger, but out of longing.  _

_ His eyes meet the ones that glow like pure electricity, and then his lips meet another pair of lips, and he feels a warmth like his whole body is on fire, and then- _

~ 

Damien’s whole body goes rigid as he wakes, startled. He finds Shayne staring back at him, eyes wide. 

“Shit,” Damien grumbles. “Did I wake you up, I’m sorry.” It scares him to see those eyes now, so real in the dream but so foreign as they stare back at him now. 

“I’ve been up,” Shayne replies, his voice muffled in his pillow. His voice lightens a little. “You know you smile when you sleep.” 

“Do I?” Damien feels himself go red. 

“You must’ve been dreaming about something good.” 

He closes his eyes, picturing the cave, and the eyes, and the everything. “I guess I was.” 


	5. lilo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _You were floating like a lilo, with your eyes closed, going where the tide goes._

“Are you just going to stand there or are you coming in?” 

Damien crosses his arms over his chest as Shayne laughs at him from the lake. “I’m just taking my time,” he sticks his tongue out at Shayne. “Sorry I’m not a fish-boy like you dumbass.”

“Oooh, burn,” Shayne pretends to cringe. 

“Oh,” Damien dashes out into the water, splashing it in Shayne’s direction but coming short. “Shut up!”

Shayne flips over onto his back, treading water as he laughs up at the sky,  _ the sound is so damn…annoying _ . His arms break the surface, pushing him farther out into the lake. “Can’t hear you!” 

Damien rolls his eyes at the boy as he dips below the surface. He narrows his eyes, searching the murky lake for a familiar grinning shape in the water. “Shayne?” It’s impossible to see any deeper than where he’s standing now. Even his feet are nearly completely invisible with the water barely up to his knees. “Hey are you there?” Slight panic is evident in his voice. There’s no bubbles or anything what if he-

“RA!!!” He explodes out of the water, tackling Damien from the side to shove him into the water. He holds Damien down by his chest, diving into the water after him, and as Damien opens his eyes in the scummy water, the stupid, beautiful, jock boy floats before him like some ethereal creature. A nymph or a siren maybe, skin a pale green in the low light, grin so sharp his teeth might have well as come to points. His hair floats in the water like seaweed, cheeks suddenly puffing wide as his eyes pop open, still so blue despite the green.

Damien feels fingers still against his chest, and finds him shocked back to the moment. He reaches up and thrusts Shayne back, making him pop out of the water, mouth open in a laugh as water sprays along with him. Damien kicks off of the bottom of the floor, barely getting a grip on the mud and rocks below, probably cutting up his feet in the process.

He swims towards where Shayne is standing, crawling out of the water and back onto his feet. “Why do you have to be so-”

His friend messes his with hair, water flicked from his body like sparks. Every part of him glitters in the fading sunlight, his chest dappled with water, dripping down to where a pair of red swim trunks stick to him like wet paper.  _ Fuck _ .

“Annoying,” he whispers.

He watches as Shayne tips his head back, eyes closed as he smooths his hair against his head. His chest rises with a long, drawn in breath, and Damien watches his nostrils flare. He tips his head back, turning to look at Damien again. “Am I still an asshole?” 

“Always!” Damien shouts back. Shayne falls back into the lake, crawling towards where Damien is standing with water up to his thighs. He lowers himself down, getting to be eye level with him.

“You know, you never told me what you dreamt about.” 

Damien feels his face grow warm. “Do I have to?”

“You were just so happy, it’s a surprise you don’t want to talk about it again.”

He looks away, unable to catch his eyes without breaking into those giddy panicking breath again. “You were there.” The words hang in the air. “Back in the cave. We stayed.”

“And…?” A softness lingers. 

His face is full and bright in Damien’s face. “We…”

He doesn’t need to say anything for Shayne to understand, but the boy doesn’t back away. Instead Damien can feel a hand float towards his own. “...And?”

The sound is so fragile Damien’s afraid that if he speaks he might break it.

So he doesn’t, and instead, leans forward to let their lips meet.

And the once stupid-idiot-blue-eyed-monkey-fish-jock-boy kisses him back.


End file.
